And the Rains Came

It is really extraordinary to watch a whole valley change color, and to do so almost overnight.

Cochabamba in the last months of the year is a landscape in dusty brown. The grass in the Andean foothills that ring the city is dead, the color of an over-milked cup of coffee. The dirt under your feet bounces up in clouds with each footstep. The riverbeds that reach down from the mountains are dry alleys of strewn rocks [as long time readers will recall, Cochabamba has rocks in abundance]. Water, the kind that falls from the sky, is a faint memory of many months before.

Then sometime just as the New Year begins, that all changes. The rains come.

First the rains just flirt. As Cochabambinos will tell you, those high clouds that appear in December and fly through town in a fury of afternoon wind aren't going to drop anything. They are just nature showing a bit of teeth. "Yes, we have water," they are saying, "but you aren’t getting any of it, not today."

That goes on a few weeks. Then the rain comes. It comes in torrents.

Sometimes the rain comes at night while you are sleeping. You never actually see it but it leaves its wet footprint in muddy puddles and wet clothes left unsuspecting on the line. There are few things as grand as a walk in my beloved hills on a cool and cloudy morning after a night of drenching.

Later it starts to come in the afternoon. You leave the house on a blistering hot summer morning and by tea and empanada break in the afternoon you are thinking about that umbrella that really wouldn't have taken up all that much room in your backpack. Of course, only gringos, with a few exceptions, carry umbrellas. Bolivians act like the falling downpour isn't really there.

Rain without drainage. "Hello new lake that wasn't there this morning." Rain in the marketplace. Rain that hovers for the day and falls like a calm shower. Rain.

And in those first few days something miraculous happens. A giant paintbrush invisibly sweeps across the hillsides and they turn, almost overnight, from tired brown to exuberant green. A visitor who arrived here this time of year, for her first time, told me, "Cochabamba looks like Hawaii." At first I thought she just had altitude sickness from her change of planes in La Paz. But looking at the low clouds hovering like cotton on the hills, and the lushness that had sprouted everywhere, I realized that she wasn't far off.

Empty fields suddenly sprout some sort of strange green plants that reach to eye level in two weeks. Grass sprouts out of the rocks that pave the streets on my hillside. The blackberry bush is popping out sweet fruit again for Mariana and I to pick and smash into our morning oatmeal.

And Cochabamba turned from brown to green. And the corn found what it was looking for. And the laundry that needs to hang on the line as to wait. And the rains came.